I have broad interests and experience as a journalist, covering the auto business, the consumer-packaged goods industry, entrepreneurship, and others, as well as politics, culture, media and religion. I used to cover the car business for The Wall Street Journal, which nominated me and some colleagues for a Pulitzer Prize for our coverage of General Motors. I've also covered autos for Edmunds.com, AutoTrader.com, Automotive News and Advertising Age. I am a major contributor to Chief Executive Magazine, Brandchannel.com, Townhall Magazine, New Nutrition Business magazine and the Journal, among other outlets. I hope that having lived around Flyover Country for most of my life gives me a grounded perspective.

Unapologetically, Volvo Aims Its New Campaign At True Believers

Volvo has been adrift and marginal in the U.S. market for several years. But now in its third year of ownership by Geely of China, the surviving Scandinavian auto brand is counting on a new marketing campaign and more confident positioning to spark an American revival in the short term while waiting for a fresher, broader product line to provide long-term prosperity.

Beginning this week, Volvo is launching an integrated advertising campaign in the U.S. that explicitly appeals to the non-materialistic, minimalist ethos that brand executives believe differentiates Volvo aficionados from buyers of other luxury and near-luxury brands.

In the process, they hope to produce a bounce in sales for a franchise whose U.S. results peaked a decade ago, when the company was owned by Ford, and have kept on sliding. Ford sold Volvo in 2010 to Geely, a large Chinese automaker, for $1.5 billion.

Volvo North America CMO Tassos Panas told me that most of Volvo’s core customers didn’t drift away even after a resource-strapped Ford began neglecting the brand’s product-development needs several years ago, nor even much once Geely introduced the strange new element of Chinese ownership of a Swedish brand into the equation three years ago.

“We would hear rumblings from our dealers when there was news in the marketplace” about problems or changes at the brand, he said. “But when the news went away, we didn’t hear much at all.”

Now, Volvo is attempting to reconnect with brand true believers as the next step in the journey back to becoming more than an afterthought in the U.S. automotive marketplace. And while Volvo never has been regarded as a true luxury vehicle, Panas isn’t afraid to put it in the company of true luxury brands in an attempt at a deft repositioning that carries some risks.

Volvo owners’ “interpretation of luxury is different but very real,” said the vice president of marketing and production planning. “They’re more into life’s experiences, and more into a Scandinavian simple design [of vehicles] versus a lot of clutter. They are very much luxury customers and love luxury products, but they don’t feel a need to impress others.”

Thus, the first new TV ads in the campaign by Arnold Worldwide of Boston, which are breaking this week on national cable networks, underscore these alleged differences. One spot, “Rearview,” juxtaposes a Volvo owner’s priorities to those of competitive luxury-car drivers.

In the ad, a woman at a stoplight in a Mercedes-BenzMercedes-Benz SUV is primping her highly put-together face in her rear-view mirror, when another woman pulls up alongside her in a Volvo XC60. The Volvo driver, pretty but less made-up, seems not to notice the Benz driver next to her. Instead, she looks in her own rear-view mirror and crosses her eyes, making her two little kids in the backseat squeal with laughter. “Volvos aren’t for everyone,” the ad intones, “and we kinda like it that way.”

A complementary outdoor effort is targeted in Volvo’s top markets, such as southern California, positioning the brand versus traditional-luxury competition—such as with the tag line, “Pretense is so past tense.” In Los Angeles, one outdoor sign, already erected, refers to the Volvo S60 as “100% real. Can’t say that about everything around here.”

Also, of course, there are digital components of the campaign, including a FacebookFacebook post featuring a purse-sized Chihuahua in a sweater with the line, “If your dog has a wardrobe, the Volvo S60 probably isn’t for you.”

Panas said that Volvo specifically is targeting BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Lexus in its campaign, which is based on new research in which the brand asked consumers not why they bought Volvos but why they weren’t buying these other brands.

“The answers we got were about people not feeling comfortable in a BMW, that Mercedes-Benz was too ostentatious, that ‘everybody in my neighborhood has a Lexus and I wanted to be different.’”

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